It is a move that is expected to happen sooner or later. Alibaba, the biiggest Chinese online marketplace owner who is working hard on mobile commerce too, sensed the challenge a while ago and had blocked webpages from its own marketplaces from being shown within WeChat last year.

But it’s not the first time Tencent entered into Alibaba’s turf. The Chinese instant messaging giant rolled out customer-to-customer & business-to-customer marketplaces and online payments service Tenpay around the time when Taobao marketplace got much traction and beat eBay China.

Now Tencent is inviting all businesses to set up stores onto the WeChat platform. If Tencent does it right this time, I think there are at least two reasons: (1) It built and started promoting WeChat Payment early on that it’s now to many a convenient and trusted mobile payment service; (2) It chooses to open the platform to third parties instead of operating anything on its own — also from them there will be future revenue sources. The two factors were also two of the reasons that brought Alibaba to this day on the Chinese Web.

TechNode is a tech blog, written in both English and Chinese, focused on startups and tech happenings in China and Asia in general. TechNode also organizes TechNode Touch (TNT), a monthly meetup for startups, and ChinaBang Awards, an annual event that rewards the best Chinese startups, in Chinese tech cities. TechNode is the official partner of TechCrunch in China and manages TechCrunch.cn and TechCrunch conferences in China.